ABSTRACT
Participating in a seminar in Rio de Janeiro on “visions from the periphery"—or, more precisely, on visions of international relations theoretically sensitive to the situation of the periphery—raises a very personal question. Will a scholar who is not from the periphery have a blinkered vision of international relations, one that peripheralizes the periphery? Behind this question lurk others. Is the periphery an objective state of affairs, a contingent, historically situated construct, or a state of mind that only someone from the periphery can appreciate? Is it all three, but only for a time that may already have passed? If the periphery is conceptual in the first instance (as I believe it is), does the very act of bringing it front and center contribute to making the world an asymmetrical territorial arrangement reflected in the terms center and periphery? Is this what scholars “from the periphery” want? Is it what I want?
